The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

  “Billy,” I said, “you are a hundred-and-ten-percent jackass.”

  “Sher’f,” he said, “you think he would have said anything at all about this if King hadn’t called in when he did? You know damn well he wouldn’t.”

  Hyzer did not answer. He kept staring at the body of the girl.

  King said, “You don’t make good sense, Billy. Why would he come in at all? No, sir. I say somebody come here after he left and before I could find my way to where that damn needle kept pointing.”

  There were too many big men in that trailer. It was overcrowded. The girl lay dead at our feet. I felt faint.

  Hyzer pushed by us and we followed him out. The doctor arrived, the ambulance following him in. By then they had to hold lights on the bodies, but they were short examinations. No enigma as to the cause of death.

  “On the man,” he said, “it got just deep enough to slit the arch of the aorta, I’d say. Death in eight to ten seconds. Visible petechial hemorrhages in the girl’s eyes and characteristic darkening of the skin. Death by drowning or suffocation. Need the time pinned down? I took the temperatures. At least one hour, possibly two.”

  “There’s another one for you,” Hyzer said.

  “Another one! What the hell is going on?”

  “I’ll get in touch later.”

  They had taken the pictures for the record. I watched them slide the two meat baskets into the ambulance and take off into the dusk at leisurely pace. No hurry anymore.

  I walked over to where Hyzer stood and said, “On my way back I stopped at the Perris place and gave the woman there some money to stay with Mrs. Perris. I told her the girl and Mr. Perris wouldn’t be back tonight. I thought the girl would be in custody. I didn’t know she’d be dead.”

  He looked at me. “What?”

  “I said I stopped and gave …”

  “Yes. Yes, I heard you. Cable, Sturnevan, stay here and help them finish up. Billy, you ride back in with King. No. Have King show you where Perris’s car is and you bring that in. I’ll take McGee back with me. Come on.” As we approached the car, he said, “You can ride in the front.”

  “Thank you.”

  He drove badly. The car wandered and he would slow down and speed up for no reason.

  I saw in the reach of headlights the blue Opel under the big tree, and then he swung into the driveway and stopped.

  “Come on,” he said and I followed him to the doorway of the lighted house.

  Nulia opened it and said, with a pleasure that surprised me, “Evenin’, Sher’f Hyzer. Evenin’! Y’all keer to come in the house?”

  I followed him in. “How is she tonight, Nulia?”

  “Well, you know. Nothing much changes.”

  “I think the best thing to do is tell her right away. They’re both dead, Nulia. Henry and Lillian.”

  She held her clenched hands against her chest and bowed her head, closed her eyes, lips moving silently. “Amen,” she said. “Best she should know. What in the world will happen to her now?”

  “I’ll see that she gets care. McGee, you wait here.”

  He went through the living room with assured step and into a hallway.

  Nulia said, “Sher’f comes to see Miz Wanda sometimes. Calls me to my own place, asks me to call him when I’m sure they’s both out for a spell. She like a ball of soft bread dough. Cain’t move one finger. Sure needs a heap of keer. For talking, she blink her eye. One time for yes, two times for no. Closes them entire when she don’t want to talk no more.”

  He was in there fifteen minutes. His face looked weary when he came out. “She taken it okay you think, Sher’f?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Shouldn’t want to cry no eyes out for them two, her or anybody else. I’m all fixed to stay here the night. My eldest brang me what I need.”

  I went out and got in with him and he drove better. He slowed down and put a spotlight on the side of the road, then made a careful turn over a short private bridge over the drainage canal and drove into a yard.

  “Baither place?” I asked.

  He said it was, turned off the lights and motor and got out. He leaned against the door on the driver’s side as if suddenly taken ill.

  “You all right, Norman?”

  “He had two weeks before he set himself up for my jail and his guilty plea and Raiford. He could reasonably figure on two, three, or four years, because he was going to go after a perfect record up there. He did all the little maintenance chores necessary when you are going to leave a house vacant in this climate through the hot seasons, through the chance of hurricane. I used to come out here and try to think like Frank Baither. I think he set up a meet to make the split, set it up far enough from here so he bought the time to tuck it all away. It was bulky, you know. I got the track deposit list. Twenty-three thousand in ones, for example. They’re counted by weight. Ninety-nine bills on the scale or a hundred and one, and the pointer swings way off center. Automatic banding. A hundred and fifty-one five in fives. Three hundred seventy-three eight in tens. One hundred eighty-eight three in twenties. Ninety-six thousand in fifties. Eighty-eight thousand in hundreds. Nine hundred and twenty thousand six hundred dollars. Take just the tens. Over thirty-seven thousand pieces of paper. Two hundred and forty pounds or so. The whole thing could go into six heavy suitcases.”

  “How did they get it back here?”

  “Just a guess. Al Storey remembers that about that time Henry Perris found some winch trouble on the big wrecker, and drove it to his place to work on it over the weekend. So he would have covered the name on the cab doors with a fake name, changed the plates. When the money-truck crew passed out, he put the hook on it and took it to the rendezvous point where the other car or cars were waiting. After they broke it open, they probably offloaded the money into Baither’s car, and he and Lillian drove back here with it, taking a different route than Henry did, bringing the truck back. They could have talked the other two into moving out quickly, into going into Miami and setting up and alibi. We’ll meet at the X motel at Jacksonville or wherever. The two pickup specialists would buy it, because Baither had the reputation for never crossing anyone, and for good planning. But he never had one that big before, one big enough to set him up for life. No more risk. So he crossed them, and left Henry and Lillian to take care of the other two when they came around. Frank Baither was making a business investment in setting himself up for Raiford. It took suspicion off him, if anybody ever decided the money-truck job looked like his handiwork. And his insurance was that he was the only one who knew where he hid it. I don’t think it mattered to him who killed off who. I think the money is here somewhere. Clean and safe and dry. But I haven’t been able to find it.”

  I whacked at the mosquitoes humming around my ears, and scratched the chigger bites on my thighs that I’d picked up on the night walk with Meyer.

  Silence. “But I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s all over for me here. I’ll wind it up. Billy can operate it until they appoint somebody to take over until election.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s all turning sour in some strange way. I don’t mean in a personal way. I knew in the back of my mind that I was wrong. I kept my eyes shut about … a personal matter, and told myself I would do such a total and dedicated job in every other way that it wouldn’t matter. But it doesn’t work that way. The scales don’t measure the way they should. One little thing in one side weighs more than … everything else in the other side.”

  A fractional moon rode above the dark line of treetops. I could not risk saying anything. He was talking to himself. Yet he was at the same time making a rare offer of friendship. He was asking for help of some kind. A man proud, thoughtful, and troubled.

  “It isn’t just that I slaved over that tape playback and weeded out almost every trace of the accent of the people I grew up with. And it isn’t that I realized and accepted the fact that I have a better mind than I thought I had when I was the high-school muscle man. Those thing
s can isolate a man from his beginnings. But there is something else in the air. The faces of the young ones and the look in the eyes of the old ones. The guidelines are blurred. Are cops pigs? If I operate within a system where juvenile court cannot touch rich kids, where the innocent—meaning those presumed innocent because they have not yet been tried—are jailed with the guilty when they can’t raise bail, where judicial wisdom is conditioned by friendship and influence, where there are two kinds of law, one for blacks and one for whites; then if I go by the book, I am a kind of Judas goat, and if I bend the rules to improve—on my terms—the structure of local law, I am running my own little police state. I’d better get out of it because I can’t live with either solution.”

  “Not with a little rule-bending here and there?”

  “Like I bent rules for Lilo Perris? And Lew Arnstead?”

  “That gravitational influence I was talking about?”

  “Do you know what it is? You go around making guesses.”

  “She was your daughter. She knew it and Lew knew it.”

  “Is it that damned obvious!” he said, his voice breaking.

  “Only to a man who mentioned her name to Johnny Hatch, and who was told by Nulia you visit Wanda from time to time.”

  It was a shabby, ordinary little story, and he felt compelled to tell it in detail, a way of punishing himself. Wanda had been married to Johnny Hatch over a year. She was bored and restless and full of vitality. Norman Hyzer had come home for Easter vacation from college, engaged but not yet married. The Hyzer backyard and the Hatch backyard had a common rear property line, though they were on different streets. She’d asked him to help her dig up a small tree and move it, asked him into her house to clean up afterward, kidded him, teased him, challenged him, and seduced him. Though aching with guilt, he had found himself unable to stay away from her during the brief vacation. Later he could take a more objective view of it, and see how easily she had engineered it, and how little it had meant to her.

  But when he came back with his wife and baby daughter after his people were dead, to clean out the house of personal things and ready it for sale, she had come casually in through the back of the house to tell him that he had a very pretty little three-year-old daughter by her, named Lillian. She told him the date of birth and asked him to figure it out for himself. There was a baby boy, Ronnie, she said, definitely Johnny’s. But Lillian was his seed.

  And they had made love that afternoon on a mattress on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and again the next morning, and had either still been making love or had finished at about the same time his wife and daughter were crushed to death by the fleeing car.

  It was classic Biblical guilt and retribution, sin and punishment. He had come back and had become sheriff. He learned one aspect of Johnny and Wanda’s divorce that was not public knowledge. Johnny’s attorney showed the judge, in chambers, medical evidence that a man of Johnny’s blood type could not have fathered a child with Lillian’s blood type when the mother had Wanda’s blood type. But there was enough evidence against her without that.

  “She was the only person in the world of my blood,” Hyzer said. “She was … maybe a symbol of the little girl who died. It’s easy to close your eyes and ears, to say she could not be warped and rotten. Wicked, in the classical meaning of the word. Bend the rules. Let her off with a reprimand. Because she would have that mocking look her mother had. She knew, and knew I wouldn’t acknowledge her. Arnstead found out four years ago. He picked Wanda up for drunk, and out of all the babbling and mumbling and weeping he heard something and got her sobered up enough to tell the rest of it, and got her to write it down before she was sober enough to realize he was using her.”

  Arnstead let him know what he knew, not in a confrontation, but in little hints. Wanda had become fat and coarse and loud, and Hyzer had already let the girl off too easily too many times. A sheriff who is snickered at, loses authority, and elections.

  “Balancing it out doesn’t work,” he said. “Lew didn’t push it too hard or too obviously, so I told myself he wasn’t doing any actual harm, maybe even some good. I told myself that his girls would be hustling anyway, so it was better to have them kept in line.”

  “Then he went too far?”

  “Beating a prisoner. Neglect of duty. Culmination of months of little things. So I had to. It was go down one way or go down the other way, and in the end you make a choice.”

  “Now I know why you were so anxious to nail us for the Baither thing.”

  He thought it over. “Yes. A suspicion in the back of my mind I couldn’t consciously admit to myself, and you and Meyer were the way out. That’s proof enough I better close it out and move along. Bend the rules and you start bending your own judgment, too.”

  “Without finding out who killed Lilo?”

  “That’s part of closing it out. After Wanda had the first stroke, when she could get around, she came to see me. The left side of her face looked dead. She made me promise to look after Lillian, keep her out of trouble. I promised. That was part of it, too. I guess. Then, a little while ago, after I told her, I wanted to know how she felt. Brutal damned question. I asked her if she was sorry Lilo was dead. She blinked her eyes twice. Same answer for Henry. That letter you showed me … Even mother-love couldn’t live through that.”

  I had to make the guess that he wanted some kind of an answer. “You have a couple of incurable hang-ups, Norman. One is an old-timey hang-up on decency. The other hang-up is thinking too much, trying to separate cause and effect and locate where the guilt is. You are not with the scene, man. Guilt only happens to people who get caught. Sex is a handshake. Man has poisoned himself and he’s on the way out, so pick up all the bread you can in any way you can. Enjoy.”

  “Sure, McGee. Sell yourself first.”

  “I keep trying, but I haven’t been able to get into the spirit of the thing somehow. I keep going back to this role-playing of mine, you know, with the white horse and the maiden fair and the grail and the dragons and all that crap.”

  One flat and mirthless grunt of laughter from Sheriff Hyzer.

  I said, “I do not want to be sickly sentimental, and I know that it is pagan barbarism to venerate the empty flesh when the spirit is long gone, but I think of Betsy out there in the night wired to that goddam tree, and how her face looks, and I keep thinking of how careful she was to look … nice. That’s the only word. Nice.”

  He opened the car door. “Show me. I can call the people in from there.”

  Nineteen

  He had a big bright camp-light in the trunk of the cruiser. We walked slowly, and he kept the light on the ground so that we could avoid destroying any foot tracks or tire tracks.

  I had trouble orienting myself at night. The tan Volkswagen would have been a big help had it been there. But it was gone. And Betsy was gone and the shovel was gone. In the grove we could walk around freely because the soft springy mat of brown needles of many seasons would not hold a print.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “That’s the third time. I am very damned sure, yes. Please stop asking. All right. One of these trees in this area, and it was about the same size around the trunk as that one.”

  It was Hyzer who spotted a silky lemon-gold thread clinging to the bark of a tree of the proper size, about four feet off the ground. Then in close inspection under the bright beam, I found a couple of blond hairs caught in the bark. That gave me enough orientation to show him where the half-dug grave had been.

  I knelt near him and held the light while he carefully brushed away the blanket of pine needles, brushed down to the ground where it had been freshly, moistly stamped flat, leaving the same sole marks I had seen in the dirt in the half grave.

  He grunted and began, just as carefully, to brush the needles back over it. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’ll take the risk of assuming Mrs. Kapp is buried right here. Will your … sentimentality get in the way of leaving her here for
a while?”

  “No. It was the tree part that got to me. This is endurable. What do you have in mind?”

  “Knowing something that somebody doesn’t know you know is a useful thing in this line of work. Sometimes you don’t know in advance how you’ll use it. I’ll come out alone tomorrow and take a cast of the shoe prints and any tire prints I can find. Let’s take a look inside that shack now.”

  Whoever had come back to the unfinished business of burying her, had done a halfway job of tidying the shack. He had scattered the ashes, put the broken lid back on the barrel safe and covered it with the fire brick. I showed Hyzer the safe.

  On the way back into town I told him, without telling him too much, exactly how eager I was for all kinds of publicity and press coverage.

  Deputy Billy Cable had drafted an official release and he was holding it for Hyzer’s approval. Hyzer sat at his desk and read it and said, “Billy, go and make certain every mouth is closed and stays closed, and then come back here.”

  Billy was back before Hyzer finished changing the release. Finally Hyzer handed it to him, saying, “Get it typed up again and get somebody to take it on over to Mr. Goss.”

  Billy read it and looked dismayed. “But …”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’ve got it person or persons unknown, and this son of bitch McGee confessed he kilt Henry Perris.”

  “He thought he did, Billy,” Hyzer said soothingly. “It was an honest mistake. Could you really believe a man could throw an oyster knife that deep into Henry’s armpit from almost twenty feet away?”

  “Well, I heard him tell how …”

  “The way I reconstruct it, it is a heavy piece of metal and it struck Perris on the skull and knocked him out. After McGee left to come here and report it, the next person along saw the opportunity and picked up the knife and thrust it into the unconscious man.”